


The Inside Man

by SoniaVice



Series: Inside Outside [1]
Category: Justified
Genre: Bisexuality, M/M, Prostitution, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 15:24:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14696973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoniaVice/pseuds/SoniaVice
Summary: Raylan just wants to make a case against Robert Quarles, and if the missing Brady Hughes is his way inside, he'll take it."Deputy," Jack said, leaning in like he was imparting a secret. "Everyone knows nothing. And I'd be obliged, sir, if you would not drive up and down the strip in your big black automobile. It's bad for business."





	The Inside Man

**Author's Note:**

> Late to the Justified party, but maybe there's some bourbon left undrunk. 
> 
> In Season 3 episode 9, Raylan tells Art that he questioned the local rent boys, fishing for information about the missing Brady Hughes. And I said to myself, what if one of then bit his hook?
> 
> This story contains: allusions to past relationships with unnamed men, who may include Boyd Crowder or might not. Sex, not very explicit, with a man who might not be telling Raylan the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Oh, and a little bit of something between Raylan and Tim Gutterson that can mean something or nothing. Raylan never comes out and guesses Jack's age, but he's definitely over 21.
> 
> All the same people live and die in all the same ways they did in late season three.

Raylan was not planning to sleep in his clothes. He wasn't planning, strictly speaking, to get back up off of his bed and get out of his clothes either.

He was asleep when the knock sounded on his door. He took it for Tim, or a cop of some kind. It sounded like the police coming to take you away. Bang, bang, bang. So he got up and didn't draw his gun, just opened the door.

The boy on the other side looked him up and down with the same confidence he'd used on the door. "You the cowboy everyone said was nosing around?"

The boy — not really a boy, if Raylan was any judge, which he was after a fashion — was shorter than Raylan, like most men, and skinny, like most whores. He had a cocky little grin and messy dark hair that couldn't help but bring Boyd Crowder uneasily to mind. His eyes were soft brown, not hard black chips off his evil soul like Boyd's, and this boy looked sly, not cunning.

"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a cowboy," Raylan said.

The boy grinned and nodded, shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, which had the intended effect of showing off his bulge, which was not small. He hadn't been hiding it before in the tight pants. "What are you, then?" the boy said, "Some kind of cop?"

His accent wasn't holler Kentucky, but it was Kentucky. Local boy, Raylan figured, but a city type. "Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens," Raylan told him.

"Shit, your daddy wanted you to grow up to be the Marlboro Man, giving you a name like that," the boy said, laughing.

"My momma wanted me to grow up like her uncle who doted on her," Raylan said, leaning on the door frame and smiling down at the boy. For a pro, he was pretty, not too soft, didn't look to be dying of anything dangerous or rotting away from the inside out on oxy or meth.

"Did you?"

"I did not. He died of too much acquaintance with coal mines." His great uncle Raylan had died a bachelor at 55 leaving behind a pair of hunting dogs, two rifles, a couple of shotguns, and a bureau in his well-kept house with half the drawers empty.

Raylan had been on his way out of Harlan and towards a new life when he'd overheard Helen talking to one of her friends about her uncle Raylan and what a queer sort he'd been. The penny had still been slow to drop, even though Raylan had long since lost his innocence in that regard.

"We have a few things in common," Raylan admitted to his visitor, meaning his uncle, but the boy made a comical face at him that said he'd taken that the wrong way around.

"You got a name I can call you?" Raylan asked.

The boy nodded at him and, as if it was his real name given to him by his momma, he said, "I'm Jack White, Deputy Givens. You call me Jack, though."

"Why am I calling you at all?"

Jack smiled at him slow, like he appreciated a good cornball line. In his line of work, he likely did. "For a good time, Deputy. No other reason. Ain't nobody down on the strip knows a thing about your fella, so if he's stepping out on you, we can't help you."

"Oh, is that so? You found out where I live, you came over to my place of residence on your own time, and you did all that to tell me you know nothing about Brady Hughes?"

"Deputy," Jack said, leaning in like he was imparting a secret. "Everyone knows nothing. And I'd be obliged, sir, if you would not drive up and down the strip in your big black automobile. It's bad for business."

"Jack," Raylan said, leaning in to purposefully mimic his posture and fake confidential tone, "why don't you come on back when you do know something, and that way me and my big black automobile will never trouble you again."

"As much as I'd like to have a reason to come on back, Deputy, I don't want to raise up your hopes that I'll ever be less ignorant on this topic."

Raylan dug in his wallet for a business card, handed it over. "Why don't you just keep this in case you need to call me."

Jack plucked the card out of his hand and looked at it, looked up at Raylan coyly through his lashes, a move so obviously designed to make him look young and innocent, Raylan raised his estimation of Jack's age by a couple of years. "Deputy, are you suggesting you want me to call you?"

Raylan hadn't been, he didn't think, but the slow burn of amusement and mild arousal he got from flirting with a person so willing to go all in on the corny innuendo was hard to resist. He'd hooked up with Winona the first time because her snappy answers to his bad one liners had been more fun than the women who'd been more directly admiring of his physical charms.

"I'm suggesting," Raylan said, "that you can come tell me what you think I need to hear whenever you like."

"I will consider your offer, Deputy. I truly will," Jack said and turned to leave without another word.

Raylan watched Jack walk away and down the stairs, and then Raylan closed and locked his door. He did strip out of his clothes before bed. He even took a shower and avoided staining his sheets.

-~***~-

Jack came back.

Raylan wasn't surprised by his return, more by the manner of it.

"Jesus Christ, kid, you want to end up with a bullet in you?" Raylan shouted.

"Not what I'm generally expecting to swallow, Deputy."

Jack was relaxed, stretched out on Raylan's bed, dressed, but for his shoes — boots, Raylan corrected, noting a pair of busted-in shitkickers on the floor. He was leafing through a book, not one Raylan remembered owning, and he didn't look fazed by having a gun pointed at him.

"Is there a reason I'm not arresting you right now," Raylan huffed, and then winced at how stuffy he sounded.

"If you want to take me in for picking that lock, you go ahead, but I think your fellow deputies might laugh at you for your ideas about security."

Raylan sighed. He was the man who kept a spare key inside the cover to his gas tank. He could hardly argue that. "What do you want, Jack?"

"I don't rightly know. I was at loose ends, and I just ended up here. It's quiet here."

This statement was punctuated by a loud shout from the crowd in the bar below that rattled the floorboards. Raylan tossed his hat onto a table and retreated to stow his gun in a cupboard. He didn't usually have guests. He usually just left it in the bedside table. On, more often than in.

His refrigerator had a bottle of ketchup and the bachelor's hallmark — a half jar of pickles turning the wrong shade of green. His watch said it was almost 10, so the kitchen below was still open but not busy. "You hungry?" Raylan called out.

"Is that a euphemism, Deputy?"

"What if it is?" Raylan asked, going to lean in the doorway to his bedroom.

Jack looked amused. "How much do you make?"

Raylan raised a brow. "'Bout twelve hundred a week."

Jack nodded. "Well, then, Deputy, if you give up your Starbucks for a while, maybe cut back on some of the frills," he looked around at the furniture that had come with the room and shook his head, "then you might be able to afford a blowjob. If I'm feeling generous and offer you a discount."

"I was offering to buy you dinner, Jack, but if you're too busy earning money by lying on my bed and doing nothing, I'll just mosey on down and eat at the bar."

"Mosey?" Jack sat up and pulled his legs into a position Raylan had last seen Winona do when she'd been serious about yoga back five years or more. The effect on the bulge in his jeans was pronounced.

They looked to be the same jeans he'd been wearing before, and his shirt was plain, tight, not expensive, but it made the point about a narrow waist and a slender upper body.

"I never turn down a meal," Jack said seriously. "But I looked over that bar, and I don't think they cotton to my sort down there."

"Bunch of college kids?"

"I never was much for books," Jack said, and grinned. "Frat boys, you know, they like you out back of the football field after they've won a game. They like to double-team. But they don't expect to sit and talk to a man like me or have him sharing the air in a shitty bar."

"They like me fine," Raylan said, suppressing the image of anyone double-teaming the man sitting on his bed, "and they'll make me burgers and bring them up."

"That sounds lovely, Deputy. We can dine on that sweet little table out in your front room. It will be cozy."

It was cozy. Raylan hadn't really counted on how small the table was, with its two wooden chairs. He knocked knees with Jack more than once. "You still know nothing about Brady Hughes?" Raylan said, to break the silence.

"I am as bereft as ever before, Deputy."

"You can call my Raylan, you know."

Jack nodded, chewed thoughtfully. "I could do that, but I'm not sure I can do that and keep a straight face."

Raylan reared back and looked at him sharply, catching the humour in Jack's eyes before he made a fool of himself by defending his low origins and his holler name.

"That's a joke, Deputy Givens. You should relax a little. I ain't calling your name gay."

"I know that. Did you mean that, what you said about the frat boys?"

"Oh, hell yes, Raylan." Jack paused like he'd just learned something. "Huh, that worked okay. Maybe if we're talking about sex, I can quit feeling like I'm the heroine in a bodice ripper and get your name past my lips. Helps if I close my eyes too. But, Raylan, in my experience, all men will fuck a man like me if the circumstances are right."

"Uh-huh."

"You don't think so?"

"I think maybe your experience might have warped your view a little."

Jack nodded. "Happens to your sort too, I expect."

"It does."

"Raylan, you know I am not Brady Hughes."

"I don't know what that means," Raylan said, aggravated by all the verbal games.

"It means I'm not here looking for a hero, so if the idea that straight men like to buy a piece of this ass is troubling to you, I'm sorry I mentioned it. My apologies."

Raylan sat back and took a drink of beer, trying to clear his head. Everything Jack said was a fog of innuendo and confusion, and Raylan couldn't see the purpose hidden inside it all. "I am untroubled, Jack, I assure you. I was mostly wondering how safe that is taking on two at a time."

Jack shrugged. "One takes precautions."

"Is that why no one will talk to me? They all think I'm some sort of uptight lawman out to persecute them out of my own insecurities?"

"Or that you're looking for a freebie," Jack said. "Or that one way they stay safe is by keeping their mouths shut." Jack sat back, meal half uneaten, and studied Raylan's face. He knocked his knee against Raylan's on purpose.

Raylan looked back as blandly as if he was at an interview with the State's Attorney.

"I think I apologized for the wrong thing, Raylan," Jack said, sunny smile breaking out on his face. The light overhead revealed a few freckles on his cheeks. Raylan wondered for a second if they were real, but forgot that whimsy when Jack continued with, "I think you know exactly how a man will fuck another man when his dick tells him it's better than nothing."

Raylan shook his head. "I don't think it's like that at all. I think some men just aren't particular in that way."

"What the hell's the difference?" Jack asked. The knocking knee had changed to a steady pressure, and then Jack leaned forward over the small table and looked up at Raylan from close enough they could smell the beer on each other's breath.

"I think the difference is I ain't never wanted to lie about it inside my own head," Raylan said.

"Outside your head is a totally different story, I reckon." Jack said, whispered almost.

"One is who people think you are, the other's who you fear you might be."

"That's a sad way of seeing it," Jack said softly, leaning up. "Don't fear the truth, Raylan."

Jack's hands were still on the edge of the table, so Raylan could finish the move for him, or he could leave Jack hanging. Then Raylan would just need to wait for Jack to try some other gambit to get under his skin for whatever reasons the man inside Jack's head had for doing what he was doing.

Raylan had never been the sort to walk on by the ripe apple hanging in easy reach.

Lips like cherry wine. His mother had favoured this old song when he'd been young, and that line had stuck in his mind. He'd never found anyone whose lips tasted of much beyond the waxy feel of lipstick, but he'd realized as a grown man that the taste of burgers and cheap beer could be sweet enough in the right circumstances.

Jack knew how to kiss, how to seem to give in while giving back, how to hum out the right sounds of encouragement, how to pull away in seeming regret, but so smooth, Raylan knew it was a move he'd used on countless men.

"Oh, that is good," Jack said, like Raylan had fed him the top shelf bourbon. "That is very fine. But I think we discussed how I'm not a man you can have for free."

"Why don't you tell me what you do want from me, then," Raylan said, letting his annoyance show.

Jack laughed, languid, like the evil temptress in an old movie who turned the hero's head before he turned back to the innocent heroine. "I don't want anything, Raylan. Other than what I already told you. Leave the working boys alone."

Raylan opened his mouth but was interrupted by the sound a phone makes when it wants to disrupt your heated conversations. Jack sighed and stood up to draw the thing out of his tight pocket. He peered at it like he was nearsighted and didn't quite like what he couldn't quite read. "I am afraid, Deputy, I have to go to work."

"Jack," Raylan said, in a helpless tone of warning, of what, Raylan didn't rightly know.

Jack was already down the hall with his hand on the doorknob. "I thank you for the conversation, Raylan," he said, and then he was gone.

The next morning someone called the switchboard at the Marshal's office and said a friend of Brady Hughes' was missing too.

-~***~-

Raylan came home to a bed that wasn't empty, but he'd stopped expecting that. Jack was asleep, stretched out, arms wide, uncovered enough to show he wasn't as naked as he looked, but he wasn't clothed either.

Raylan looked at the time, noted it was past seven, and he considered just turning around and getting dinner before finding some other bed to sleep in. He considered dropping his jeans on the floor and making himself at home in his own bed. He decided toeing off his boots and tossing his hat aside while he got out the whiskey was a nice middle ground.

Jack was right. Raylan had no money to afford what might not even be for sale in that bed.

Raylan rolled the whiskey around on his tongue and worked over the idea in his head that Jack was afraid of Robert Quarles and was hiding out. It didn't taste right. He tried out the idea that Jack was a friend of Brady Hughes' and was looking to see if Raylan had anything on his whereabouts, and that didn't taste right either.

Raylan was on his second bourbon, not saying as to how many fingers had been involved in the measuring of each one, when a knock on the door interrupted his musings. He'd never been so popular at the motel. He'd moved so no one could shoot him through a door that had direct line of sight to his bed, and the place tucked over a bar was supposed to be hidden.

Raylan pulled open the door to Tim Gutterson looking a little smug like he always did.

"Tim," Raylan said, eyeing the file folder in his hand.

"Raylan," Tim said. "You inviting me in, or you want to talk in the hallway here?"

Raylan tilted his head and looked down at Deputy Gutterson. He was a straight shooter as far as Raylan knew, literally and figuratively. Raylan wasn't sure what Tim thought of him, not completely. He let the man in and led him down the hall. Raylan glanced to his right at the sleeping boy in his bed. Wasn't like Tim hadn't already seen a lot of Raylan's inner self. What was a little more?

Tim stepped into the room on Raylan's left, glanced into the bedroom himself, and then Tim moved so he was out of sight of the bedroom doorway. Out of the line of fire, Raylan reckoned. Tim did that like he breathed in air.

"He's not dead, I take it?" Tim said calmly.

"Jack? No, he just seems to sleep here sometimes."

"Really? I lived in a place once where this cat came along and acted like it lived there. This sort of like that?"

"Seems to be," Raylan said. "Seems to be. What you got, there, Tim?"

"I have information, Raylan, of a work nature, but if you're busy with your ... cat, I can just mosey on home and we'll talk in the morning."

"I'm not busy doing anything," Raylan said. "What have you got."

"Uh," Tim glanced at the bedroom, where he couldn't see what Raylan could see, which was Jack padding over to the doorway barefoot and dressed only in a pair of boxers a size too big and riding low on his hips.

Jack stepped just across the threshold and smiled languidly around at everyone like he couldn't quite focus. "I am just going to use your shower, Raylan, so if you gentleman want to talk, I'll be sure to close the door tight."

"Oh, help yourself," Raylan said sarcastically.

"I, will, Deputy, thank you. Why stop now?"

Tim turned to look at Raylan, his face a blank except for the amusement in his eyes.

"What have you got?" Raylan asked briskly.

"Surveillance reports from the LPD on Quarles place. Thought you might want to look it over, see if anything pops for you."

Raylan raised a brow. "The LPD are watching him now? And they just gave you the raw reports?"

"I know someone who owed me a favour. This is a copy, so we don't need to give it back, but we don't want to leave it laying around where anyone can find it, either."

"Sit," Raylan said, pointing to the nearest chair. "You want a drink? There's beer, I think."

"No, I'm good."

Raylan leafed through the pages, stopping to read some licence plate numbers. "Did they run all these plates?"

"I assume so."

"Run 'em. Maybe we'll see something they don't understand is significant."

Tim made a face at him and grumbled a bit as Raylan scanned the papers and then handed the file back. "You do what else with it what you think you should, Tim. You don't need me to tell you how to go on."

"Such a sweet talker," Tim said.

"He sure is," Jack called out from the bedroom, and Raylan realized the shower had stopped. "God damn you to hell, though, Deputy Givens," Jack added, coming through the door, struggling dramatically to get the zipper up on his painted on jeans. They were cut to show how skinny his legs were and artfully faded to draw the eye to his crotch and his narrow hips.

Tim raised a brow and crossed his arms and watched the show.

"What have I done, exactly, Jack?" Raylan said.

"Fed me that burger and now I can barely get into these pants. I have to go to work, Raylan."

"Am I stopping you?"

Jack laughed at him, finished tugging up the zipper and then shimmied his hips to accomplish nothing Raylan could see. That denim wasn't moving any way but by being peeled off. Jack had nothing with him — no bag, no jacket, and only the outline of his phone in his pocket indicated he had anything on his person but his person. Raylan had noticed he never had a wallet marring the rear-view provided by his jeans.

"Jack," Raylan said, when he just headed for the door with no explanation as to why he'd ever come.

"Oh, sorry, baby," Jack said and stalked over and rose up, dramatically, on his tiptoes and planted a kiss on Raylan's lips. "See you around sometime."

He was gone before Raylan could imagine what he could say to that.

"He's a pro?" Tim said, laughing.

"He seems to be," Raylan said, nodding. "He's latched onto me for some reason, after I went nosing around on that tip about Brady Hughes."

"What's he want?"

"That I don't know. I'm hoping he'll tell me when it suits him."

"In the meantime, you just sleep with him and don't ask questions?"

"I ain't sleeping with him, Tim. He just shows up here, takes liberties, and then leaves."

"Uh-huh. Matter of time, before one liberty taker and another end up in the same bed," Tim said. He picked up the file he'd brought and headed for the door. "Don't call me when it all blows up in your face, Raylan."

Raylan went back to his bourbon, and considered the ease with which he had come out to Tim. After a fashion, he had. He resented the entire idea of coming out, always had. He'd always believed that his sexual desires, all of them, were part of his inner self, and not to be shared with the world.

But he'd been a hypocrite about that more than once. He'd never tried to hide his thing with Ava, but there were other things he'd kept under tighter wraps. Not so wrapped up as his old uncle Raylan, a man who had seemed so stiff and unfeeling to him as a child, he'd felt nothing of remorse when the old man had died. But he'd never let it all spill out of the inside of his head like some other boys he'd known over the years.

His bed smelled of man when he finally fell into it, cologne that he thought was too fine for a cheap whore. Jack would tell him he wasn't cheap, Raylan figured, if he levelled the accusation.

-~***~-

Raylan took Lindsey to his bed because the circumstances seemed right, and he did it knowing that Jack could walk in like he was of a mind to, and maybe Raylan wanted that. Maybe he wanted to put all the distance in the world between himself and Robert Quarles and prove something to Jack as much as to himself. He was grateful he'd changed the sheets, though.

He thought on that while Lindsey slept, and he didn't. He thought on Quarles using a boy like Hughes or like Jack for sick purposes, and he thought about himself. He thought about Jack and what he'd enjoy doing to him. With him? Raylan wasn't sure how it would play out. With Lindsey, it was clear what she wanted, what they both got out of it, but with a man like Jack, what was giving and what was taking?

If Tim hadn't come around the day before, would Raylan have gone into his bedroom eventually and taken what was so obviously on offer? Called Jack on his bluff. If it was a bluff. He wasn't sure, but he didn't seem to be making decisions with his upstairs brain too often lately.

Jack, of course, came back. He wasn't in Raylan's bed when Raylan walked in, he was in the chair in the main room, intent on his phone, and he flicked a glance at Raylan as he walked down the short hall. Jack just nodded, serious-faced, and went back to what was occupying him. Raylan tossed his hat aside, disarmed himself, and poured whiskey into a glass and sat in the other chair.

"Babe, just give me a minute," Jack said, distracted, not like himself at all.

"Jack, I'm out of gas, here. What the hell do you want with me?"

Jack set the phone down and sat up, looked Raylan in the eye. "Place to sleep. Just tonight."

He seemed totally genuine, yet Raylan was sure it was all bullshit. Everything about Jack, right down to his accent that faded in an out like a radio station on a road trip, was either fake or campy put-on or both.

Robert Quarles was still out there somewhere, and the chances that Brady Hughes wasn't dead were next to none.

"Fine," Raylan said. "If you snore, I'm kicking you out into the hall." Raylan tossed back his drink and went to hit the head for longer than he needed. He didn't suddenly get smarter while he was in there, so he stripped down to his underwear, got in bed and tried to pretend it was normal when Jack slid under the sheet behind him.

Winona had called him a twitchy son of a bitch more than once, and Raylan didn't have any illusions that he was a quiet sleeper, but he tried to be still.

Jack sighed loudly and grabbed Raylan's biceps firmly, gave him a little shake. "Sleep, Deputy," he said. "Go get the bad guy in the morning."

"Brady Hughes is dead," Raylan said, voice a rasp in the quiet that had descended after the bar closed. After closing was the terrible time of night when his thoughts became loud enough to hear.

"I expected that," Jack said. "We all know that happens."

"Just like that?" Raylan told the empty darkness on his side of the bed. He thrashed around to roll over, to find Jack eyeing him up with weary amusement. "Shit happens?"

"It does," Jack drawled out. "Nothin' a man can do sometimes but ride it out."

"Do you know who Robert Quarles is?" Raylan demanded.

"I do not," Jack said. "Should I?"

"He's the guy who killed Hughes. He then grabbed a friend of his and chained him up in the bathroom. He'd be dead too if we hadn't busted in there today." Raylan realized he had Jack by the shoulders and was shaking him, and he took a breath and tried to calm down.

"And that's why you were asking around," Jack said, like this was news. "Raylan," he sighed, and broke out of Raylan's grasp, but he didn't go far; he laid his hand on Raylan's face and teased at the stubble of Raylan's beard with his thumb. "Raylan, shit does happen. All the damn time. And no one can stop it, not all of it."

"You take risks, Jack."

"So do you, Raylan."

Raylan made a noise of frustration, and Jack leaned in and kissed him quiet. Raylan did not know what the hell they were doing. He should kick Jack out and just go find Lindsey, be sensible, but Quarles was out there. The world was full of monsters.

"Raylan," Jack said, voice so soft, Raylan had to still his body to hear the sound. "Most men, all's they want is to get off with the feel of a man's hands on their body. Lot of them likely don't even know why they like it, but they ain't crazy in the head because of it. You know what that want feels like, don't you?"

Raylan, who had his hands all over a man's body at that very moment, could hardly argue the point.

"You going after this fella you say killed one of my kind?" Jack asked.

"Quarles? Yeah, I'll see him put where he belongs."

"You want me to tell you to be careful doing it? Or you want me to treat you like a man and tell you, 'Baby, do what you gotta do'?"

"I want you to be safe, Jack. I've given up on you ever telling me what you want, why you're hiding out here. I got too many people doing all sorts of shit for their own reasons on this case. I'm giving up."

"I ain't hiding, Raylan. I'm just here to make sure you get a good night's sleep is all. Now, come on and forget about the world for a while, and tell me what makes you feel good."

"Jack, I—" Raylan said, putting all the apology in the tone he could find, so it was easier for both of them when he said no.

"Okay, Raylan, I'll just guess," Jack said, moving in to kiss him again, hard and insistent.

Jack wormed his arm under Raylan and hooked a leg over him, and Raylan's objections vanished in a haze of lust that burned red like blood. It wasn't so much that he liked getting off to the feel of a man's hands, it's that he liked getting off to the feel of a man's body under his.

Jack was skinny in his clothes, slender naked, but in bed, he was sinuous strength and smooth skin. A handful of his ass was substantial enough, and it wasn't until Raylan was on the edge of the cliff and ready to fall into sleep that he thought that for a little slip of a boy, Jack was a hard-muscled and well-fed one.

-~***~-

Jack was gone in the morning.

Raylan bundled the dirty sheets off the bed into his laundry bag and tried not to dwell on how Jack had sneaked out without waking him.

Raylan went out and did what he had to do to get Quarles, and it wasn't one of Jack's kind who ended up dead, it was a lawman in a hat murdered by Arlo. Quarles bled out at Raylan's feet, and the whole sorry mess left Elstin Limehouse still sitting at the centre of his web with Boyd Crowder a free man.

All Raylan could do was watch them all go free, all but Arlo. He made sure the gun that killed Gary was tied to Quarles so nothing could ever come back on him or Winona, and it was to her door he ran when he was finally free of paperwork and the worried looks of Art Mullen.

She was the only person he could imagine telling the truth to about why Arlo had killed Tom Bergen. He wouldn't say it made no impression on her. He would say that she refused to let the knowledge dent her will any.

She didn't want him to stay; he could see that. She didn't want to be in his life, was the truth. She'd never wanted to know what he thought he needed to do to try to set the world to rights, only why he kept on doing it when it endangered her.

He got in his car and drove home, unable to find any censure for her feelings. She had a baby to care for, it was right there inside her body, not just some idea of a kid taped up on the bathroom mirror. She saw the world different to him; he understood that much without being told.

He drove around by a particular Lexington street when he got back to town, and he watched the young men appear in his headlights, one after the other, selling a few minutes of pleasure. The kind that wouldn't kill you.

The bar was dark and quiet when he pulled up, and he used his key on the door around back that let right into the stairway. When he climbed the stairs, he found his apartment door was open an inch and there were lights on inside.

Raylan had his gun out, and he kicked the door open from the side. The light shone down the hall, and Raylan moved carefully until he could see both rooms. Jack was sitting right out in plain view.

"You could wait until I'm home and then knock," Raylan said, noting in a distant way that it was arousal making his heart pound, not adrenaline. He hadn't really figured there was anyone left out there who wanted him dead, not over Quarles. Not even Wynn Duffy wanted to avenge that man.

"I could, Raylan, and I guess it's a failing of mine that I don't like to wait around in dark alleys for a man to come along."

Raylan stared for too long, trying to find the humour in that. He ditched his hat and boots, and took off his gun and badge and looked at them in his hands.

"I hear your Quarles is dead," Jack said.

"Took too many people with him."

Jack didn't say anything, just shifted in the chair. Raylan noticed his feet were bare, and he saw the boots over by the door. He'd walked right by them without noticing.

"Do you want to forget for a spell?" Jack asked.

Raylan laughed, tight and unpleasant sounding. "You sound like an oxy dealer."

"That shit kills you while it numbs the pain, Raylan. What I'm offering reminds you you're a man, that you're alive. Never was real clear on why sex was something people were afraid of. It's just about being alive."

Raylan looked at Jack, at all the things he seemed to be. He had a light in his eyes of humour and desire, and his hair looked like he'd just risen, tousled, from a bed. It made a man want to tumble him back into it. "With the light on this time," Raylan said, and Jack broke out in a big smile. It even looked genuine.

Jack's body was unmarked by any ink or sign of pain or suffering. He looked like an innocent naked and aroused. He stretched out on Raylan's bed in a pose too studied to be called artful, and he looked up at Raylan, naked but much less innocent, and Jack laughed. It sounded like happiness. "Raylan, baby, do what you gotta do."

"Do you have a book full of these lines," Raylan groused as he set one knee down beside Jack and leaned down onto his elbows until Jack could stretch up and receive the kiss Raylan gave him before Raylan pulled back. He had a mind to make Jack work for what he obviously wanted.

"I should write a book," Jack said, flopping back down. "101 ways to please your man."

"101 bad pickup lines," Raylan said. "I don't need no hundred, I'm thinking of one way in particular."

"Raylan you claimed not to be particular. But I bet I know what you're after. You tell the truth now, you've been after it since the day we met."

"Maybe," Raylan said, frowning down at Jack. "Maybe I have been. I'm not a virtuous man."

"I ain't saying no, Raylan Givens, so why don't you get down here and warm me up a little before you fuck me. "

Jack liked to wrap his limbs around Raylan while they fucked, and he had a way of throwing his head back and exposing his throat as he moaned. A gesture of submission, Raylan supposed, meant to arouse the beast inside a man to want to conquer. And to get it all over with sooner — business and pleasure both getting served.

All Raylan had to do was apply his teeth lightly to the length of exposed flesh and Jack shuddered and shook like he was enjoying himself. "Raylan, come on, give it some hips for me."

"I ain't in no hurry," Raylan told him, shifting to thrust harder all the same."

"Just for a bit, then, I do love it when I feel like a man meant to fuck me hard."

Raylan wasn't sure there was a difference between accident and design, but he could give it a try. He tried to give it to Jack like he meant something by it.

Sweat was blooming on their bodies, carrying the clean smell of the man to him. Raylan couldn't stop looking at him, flushed and spread out, taking it, wanting to, and Raylan had to taste his mouth. He slowed and dropped down and tried to kiss Jack deeply and fuck him at the same time.

Jack clenched around him, intentional — he was a master as using his muscles like spurs to Raylan's hide. "You want more?" Raylan asked.

"Raylan, I have a request if you'll indulge me."

"I'd likely agree to anything right now."

Jack laughed and pushed at Raylan. "Pull out for a second."

Jack rolled over on his side, and drew his top leg up high to his chest. "From behind, like this, and I think you'll hit the bulls eye just right."

Raylan did as he was asked, and tried to get the rhythm to flow, short and sharp, once Jack had him angled to his satisfaction.

"Oh, hell yeah, Raylan, baby, like that."

Raylan did as he was told and gave all he could give. Jack was boisterous and loud, shouting out his pleasure like a good old boy laughing as he took his pickup down a mountain road too fast, half drunk on moonshine.

And when Raylan was ready to lose his mind from a sweet ride inside that tight, hot body, he reached around and looked for some trouble to get into.

Jack groaned and said, "The size of your hands."

"Yeah? You want some attention."

"I want it all, Raylan. All of it, give me what you got."

Raylan laughed into the back of his neck, but he shifted their bodies a little, held on tighter, stroked him harder and moved his hips as hard as he could. They weren't moving much, but all the right parts were in motion, and Jack groaned on every thrust, head back, eyes shut, sweat slicking his body.

Raylan pressed his mouth to Jack's shoulder, and tasted his skin, took in his smell, and rode hard for glory, like a cowboy in the final frame of an old movie. The end was like crashing over a cliff. Like a long fall into the rushing water of a river that would bear you away from all your troubles. Take you far from all your dead — your friends and your enemies.

Raylan woke up with the dawn shining in the windows, and Jack sitting on the bed in that yoga pose that showed off his flexible hips.

"You don't have your boots on, so I guess you aren't quite ready to run for it," Raylan said.

Jack smiled, a tight little grimace. He had the rest of his clothes on, and he looked serious, not at all like a good old boy high on life and figuring out things his dick could do he'd never before considered.

Raylan shook off the past and got himself half sitting up.

"I've been thinking of moving on for a while now," Jack said, tone flat, not really selling it too hard.

"You going to move on to a new line of work, or just a new address?"

Jack flashed a grin at him. "Only got the one marketable skill."

"Sure. You want me to write you a reference?"

"Fucking smart mouth," Jack groused. "Deputy Givens, you gave me what I asked for. That's enough."

"Jack, hold up." Raylan leaned over and found his wallet in the bedside table drawer, covered over with an upended box of condoms. "I don't know if you mean what you're saying or not, but if you ever find yourself in Miami, this number," Raylan pulled out the card, "they ain't above board, but they're less dangerous than some."

He handed the card to a bemused Jack, who looked at it and tilted his head up and said, "Raylan, are you getting sweet on me?"

"Little bit."

Jack tucked the card away in his pocket, and he looked away out the window at the neon that was never turned off before he turned back to level a serious look at Raylan. "I'll remember that, Deputy. I promise you that."

-~***~-

Tim called him from the bar on a night Raylan had been contemplating drinking alone in his room. He'd backed off from Lindsey, and she was leaving him be but still keeping an eye on him. Winona didn't want to hear his stories about his dead friend or his black humour about disarming Robert Quarles. She wanted to keep her baby safe.

He couldn't just leave Tim down there, though. Anything could happen; he could meet some college girl and get married and ruin his life. So Raylan got up off the bed and put his hat on his head and went downstairs.

Tim had a beer, a whiskey, and a file set out on a table in the quietest corner.

Raylan collected a double bourbon from the bar before he sat down to learn whatever was in that file. He knew he didn't want to know, but he went anyway. He owed Tim.

"Raylan," Tim said with a frown.

"Tim," Raylan answered, finding a little irony to put a spin on it. "Do you have to tell me what's in those pages?"

"I don't, no. But you're curious, I'm sure you are."

"About?" Raylan asked, but he knew. They wouldn't be in the bar if it was work, and they'd be upstairs if Tim didn't want to keep Raylan from making a fuss.

"Jack White."

"Okay," Raylan said. "He's gone, you know."

Tim nodded and sipped his beer. "I figured."

"What did you do? Run his prints?"

"It was easy," Tim said. "He'd been all over your place. I assume I could have got DNA if I'd wanted to."

Raylan made a face and gulped back too much whiskey. He decided to ignore that Tim had to have broken into his apartment. He'd done nothing to make that difficult. "Whad'ya find?"

Tim didn't open the folder, just rested his hands on it like he took in the information by osmosis. "His real name is Jonathan Whiteside. He was born outside Cincinnati in Ohio, and he was arrested at 16 for street hustling in Louisville."

Raylan frowned, surprised that Jack had given him almost his real name and real life story. He waved at Tim to keep going, because Tim's face said there was a bigger story under his still fingers.

"He was arrested again, or picked up is more accurate, in some sort of sweep of street kids a few months later. He produced a fake ID that said he was 18. Good enough fake to fool the cops, and they let him go."

"Wait, if he was using a fake, how do you — someone ran his prints before you, and—"

"Whose story is this?" Tim asked, affronted.

"Okay, okay, you tell the tale." Raylan returned to his bourbon and listened to the list of police encounters. He was expecting an escalation of prostitution charges, maybe some time inside.

"A couple of years later, when he was 19, he was picked up in Jacksonville, Florida and somehow convinced the local cops there he was underage. There is a suspicious lack of detail in the reports, so I think they got fooled by another fake. They put him in a group home, and he vanished."

"Sounds like him," Raylan said, and then covered his chagrin with a pull on his drink. He'd sounded like he missed the boy, and that was a road he couldn't ever walk down.

Raylan kept his eyes on Tim, to avoid Lindsey's curious face from behind the bar, so he was watching Tim watching for his reaction when he said, "Then four years ago, when he was 22, he was interviewed as a witness in a homicide."

"Whoa, Tim. You're saying he's 26 years old? Am I such an old man everyone under 30 is a kid to me?"

"I'm under 30," Tim said calmly.

"Go to hell, Gutterson," Raylan said. "Shit. Witness to a homicide?"

"Yeah," Tim said, looking down at his hands and then fussing with his beer.

"You having second thoughts about telling this?" Raylan asked him.

"No, you?" Tim countered.

"Tell me."

"The shooting was at a no-tell motel off the highway in some shit town in the Florida panhandle. The cops were called by the manager who'd been sacked out in the vacant room on one side of the vic. He'd heard the shots even though there'd been a silencer used. Whiteside was in the room on the other side. He told the cops he was a poor college student driving his old beater back to school the back way from up home in Alabama, and they believed every word. They printed him because he told them he'd tried the door after he heard a strange thump, and no one would answer. He went off on his way, and they never solved the case."

"Who's the vic?"

"Hmmm," Tim said, nodding approvingly. "Guy named Dale Alvin Wilkes. Wanted in Florida for assaults on two street hustlers, suspected in a couple of deaths. The Miami cops couldn't prove the case and let him go. He'd been out about 24 hours when he was killed."

"Miami," Raylan said, picturing the card he'd given Jack and the look on his face, his serious tone. Raylan had taken it for appreciation of his concern.

Tim said, "There's more."

"There has to be," Raylan said. "Who put that file together?"

"Georgia State Police started it," Tim said promptly. "Three years ago, a man named Jack Redthorne was interviewed as a witness to a shooting at a motel north of Jacksonville in some town on the water just over the Georgia state line. The vic wasn't killed, just shot once in each knee. Redthorne, who had a fake ID so good it fooled the cops, was in the room next door."

Raylan sucked in a breath. "And?"

"And the vic wouldn't talk. No cooperation. The Georgia Staties figured it was mob related and filed a report that got copied to a task force in Florida where the vic is from. Eventually, a guy on the FBI gang unit looked at it, remembered the other case, and had Georgia send him all their forensics. He ran the prints — from inside the vic's room, this time — and up popped Whiteside, and then he collected all these pieces of the puzzle over the last while."

Tim let him think for a minute, and Raylan appreciated the courtesy, but he waved Tim on with the rest of it.

Tim said, "He thinks there's more cases with no prints. Sometimes it's just a report of a guy who fits the description at or near the scene of a shooting. He's got some vics with the right profile, but some of his hits are tenuous stuff padding the file."

"And?" Raylan asked, totally convinced, and fully able to see how the Jack he'd known could also have this man from Tim's file inside him.

"And he says if we ever see Jack White again to call him. He hasn't got enough for an arrest warrant, though." Tim leaned back and took a drink, frowned at the bottle, and switched to his chaser. "You've heard of the guys they call the Rainbow Mob in Miami?"

Raylan snorted. "No one not a fucking Feeb calls them that, but yeah, they're connected to the Cubans, but they run the gay prostitution, drugs at the gay clubs, all that sort of thing"

"The Feeb who gave me all this thinks your boy is their hitter. The profile of the victims tends towards men they might want out of the picture. Maybe Miami runs the gay scene here now, and that's why he was here."

"So what the hell was he doing here? Watching me? Watching Quarles? He could have shot him a hundred times and just left."

"You ever see a gun?" Tim asked.

"No, never."

"Ankle holster?"

"No," Raylan said promptly, picturing him in bare feet, posed on the bed, naked in the bed, half-naked and walking around. "No, he never even had a wallet, only a phone. I assume there was a car nearby." He'd used Raylan's condoms too, had none on his person.

"Maybe he was here to take out Quarles if you didn't," Tim said. "Maybe he wanted you to do it so nothing blew back on him from Detroit. Or maybe he was waiting for word that the Hughes kid was really dead first."

"Wynn Duffy was the tipster, not Jack."

"And they never found the body until long after Quarles was dead," Tim said. "Whatever he was doing, Raylan, he was the perfect man for you — a stone-cold killer hiding inside a cliché come to life."

Raylan ignored Tim and looked over at Lindsey watching him with concern. Jack had known just how to make him forget dead friends and the smell of blood so powerful it felt like it was soaked into your skin. Lindsey was fun, and her hips felt right in his hands, and she lived in the moment. She was a little wild just like a good old boy on a bender could be, too.

She'd pulled that shotgun on Quarles like it was natural, but Raylan couldn't imagine that the woman inside Lindsey was anything like who Jack hid with his campy one-liners and clever mouth. Or like the man inside Raylan himself. She was, inside and out, just who she seemed to be.

"He told me if I was looking for a man, I should hit on you," Raylan said to Tim, to see what he'd do, to see if he could unsettle Tim, like none of this story had seemed to do.

Tim raised his brows and smiled. "Are you looking for that, Raylan?" He sounded like he found it all funny.

Raylan stood up and put his hat back on. "I think I've had enough of killers for a while."

He headed right for Lindsey and tried his best cornball line.

She laughed, but her eyes flicked to a spot over his shoulder, and Raylan tracked Tim's exit from the bar by watching her darting eyes. He put on a bigger smile, tried a little harder to be the man he showed to the world, to pretend that Raylan was real.

Lindsey turned back to him and smiled back, all tupelo honey and sunshine.


End file.
